Day camp lets youth experience nature

DARRINGTON — Ginny Green’s daughter, Raina Hubbard, got to raft the Skagit River, bike around a campground, and join a hike led by a National Forest Service guide on a trail surrounded by trees up to 250 years old.

Both Green and her daughter, who live in Clinton, were participating in an annual event May 11 called Hike, Bike and Boat. The event was coordinated by the Wild and Scenic Institute, based in Mountlake Terrace.

More than 100 kids, teens and young adults, some of whom had never before had a wilderness experience, got a chance to smell fir- and cedar-scented air and bump through rapids on a federally designated Wild and Scenic River.

Participants included children with autism, homeless kids, those from low-income neighborhoods and some with disabilities.

Raina Hubbard, 21, an Edmonds Community College student, has cerebral palsy, is deaf, and communicates with American Sign Language. Special rigging was used to secure her wheelchair to the river raft, her mom said.

“She said it was fun to … see all the beautiful trees and she loved being in the water,” Green said.

The two-hour trip took place on an unusually warm, sunny spring day. Campers saw hawks and a beaver dam at the river’s edge.

“It was spectacularly beautiful,” Green said. “You could look back and see way up into the mountains, the Cascade Pass area.”

After their river run, campers traveled to the Clear Creek Campground, three miles south of Darrington, for biking and hiking.